Quickie Movie Reviews (2009): Volume Six
Apparently I’ve been forgetting to toss in the “value” feature. So, it’s back in this batch. There are a whole mess of Miyazaki films here, in case anyone is interested. Otherwise, there are a few other interesting films to consider. So here goes: The Good German (George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, Tobey Maquire)A stylistically nostalgic film that chronicles an American journalist’s attempts to solve the murder of a deceptive young corporal that nobody else seems interested in. His journey takes him through an intricate web of relationships that draw him to a Russian commander, a presumed-dead member of Hitler’s SS, and an ex-lover with her own deceptive agenda.Pros: The Good German does an amazing job of capturing the film styles of pre-color (and post-silent) films, not only in its visuals, but also in its plot and characters. I was also surprised that Clooney and Blanchett so easily pulled off their non-English moments while on the screen. Clooney is particularly strong here.Cons: The plot could have used some thickening to make it fit together better. Perhaps this was part of Soderbergh’s design in engaging with a nostalgic film past, but it can be a little jarring if you’re not used to the style. Tobey Maguire is not at his best in this one (thankfully his role is rather small).Rating: 3/5Value: $4.75 Ultraviolet (Milla Jovovich)Based on the comic book series, this attempt at high-concept science fiction thrusts us into a future world where “pure” humans have waged a largely successful campaign to exterminate the infected hemophages. Violet, a hemophage, steals a human weapon only to discover that it is actually a boy with a mysterious origin.Pros: The concept here is actually quite brilliant. This is a world in which weapons can be hidden is strange dimensional “pockets” on the body and where germophobia has been taken to its logical extreme. There are a lot of great science fiction concepts in this film.Cons: The first ten minutes or so are wasted on a monologue explaining to us who the main character is. For a movie that is supposed to be rather action-packed, this is not only a drain, but exceedingly annoying. The visuals also are lacking. Whether they were going for a certain “video game” style or not, it looks amateur at best and downright awful at the worst. It’s a waste of a perfectly good concept to reduce it to fouled up visuals.Rating: 2/5Value: $3.00 Whisper of the Heart (Hayao Miyazaki)Shizuku is a junior high student going through the trials and tribulations of self-discovery. During her summer vacation, she notices an ordinary-looking cat riding the train and decides to investigate. Soon she meets Seiji, a boy who is determined to follow his dreams, and soon sets out on her own journey to follow her dreams of writing, weaving a tale of magic and intrigue, using characters made familiar in The Cat Returns.Pros: Some brilliant characterization here. Unlike other animated films I have seen, this one does not skimp on making all of its characters completely three-dimensional. One of the most interesting things about this movie is how it ties into The Cat Returns; you get the sense that The Cat Returns is more an extension of the Shizuku’s imagination and stories, a metanarrative, if you will; this adds some brilliant depth to a film about talking cats and other silliness. There’s a lot of charm here.Cons: The story tends to drag. This is not “typical” Miyazaki. There isn’t a lot of magic and weirdness here, but more an in-depth, emotional journey through the world of Shizuku. It’s a beautiful story, but somewhat difficult to get into if you don’t go into it with the right mindset.Rating: 3/5Value: $5.25 My Neighbor Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki)A unique story about a family split up by an unexpected illness and two sisters who discover the world of the mysterious Totoro. The Totoro come in all shapes in sizes, but all of them are furry, and all of them cannot be seen by adults. This heartwarming tale is a clever mixture of family drama and Alice in Wonderland style oddness.Pros: The visuals in this are quite unique, not because this is a Miyazaki film, but because the design of the settings and characters are memorable in every way. I especially loved the detail of the cat/bus thing. My Neighbor Totoro is also quite cute and powerful for a film meant for kids. I think there’s something that had to be said about the ways that Miyazaki manages to take complicated subjects and make them work for a very young audience.Cons: The ending feels very much incomplete. I won’t ruin the plot or what is incomplete, but just note that this doesn’t end in concrete fashion. There are still some unanswered questions. Other problems are that this one can drag just a little in the beginning, which seems typical of Miyazaki.Rating: 3/5Value: $6.50 Kiki’s Delivery Service (Hayao Miyazaki)Kiki, a thirteen-year-old witch, heads out into the wide world in order to fulfill tradition and spend one year training away from home. With Jiji, a talking black cat, and her mother’s broom, she sets up a magical delivery service in a seaside town. A cute tale about a young girl discovering herself, Kiki’s Delivery Service is a fantastic film by one of the greatest animation directors of all time.Pros: A cute story with brilliant animation (as expected) and wonderful characters. I got a kick out of Jiji and wish there had been more of him. While not my favorite of Miyazaki’s, this is certainly memorable and enjoyable. If you have kids, this is definitely one they should see. Don’t forget to watch the end credits, because there’s loads of cute stuff there.Cons: The ending is somewhat un-fulfilling, if not incomplete. There is a resolution, but it didn’t meet what I had expected by the end. Beyond that, though, it’s hard not to love this one.Rating: 4/5Value: $9.50
Brain Freeze: Where to next?
I’ve come to a standstill on this blog. That’s not to say I don’t have anything else to say, just that I’m not sure where to go next. Having now finished the cyberpunk series, I’ve hit a point where I can offer nothing more on punk literature, primarily because I do not know enough about the other movements. Steampunk is something I’ve yet to spend considerable time reading, and all the newer punks (dieselpunk, biopunk, greenpunk, etc.) are either too new to have grown into established subgenres or unfamiliar to me. I also suspect that going on a long tear on capitalism in science fiction, particularly the critique of it, would be of little interest to all of you reading this blog. I do not want to come off as the radical Marxist science fiction guy, because I am not a Marxist by any stretch of the imagination. I simply see between the lines and readily admit that capitalism is like any other system: flawed and easily manipulated by people with “agendas.” But, I like capitalism; when regulated, it is one of the best economic models in existence. Unfortunately, this is getting away from the point of this post. In the course of writing the cyberpunk series, however, I found myself becoming remarkably out of the loop in the SF/F community. I used to have a good idea about the goings on, but it seems that has changed, or I simply find those things that are going on to be rather trite or meaningless. So, this is where I ask all of you a few questions: what are you interested in? What do you want my opinion on, or what do you feel is a pressing issue that needs addressing? Where do you think or want me to go next? I value your opinions and thoughts, which is why I am asking. Yes, this seems like I’m fishing for blogging ideas from all of you, but it is also to help me get a grasp on things that I otherwise would be unable to address. Graduate school and teaching, being what they are, does not lend one excessive amounts of free time for external research. That means, right now, I am focused on my studies, on what I intend to write about for my masters thesis, rather than on what is outside of that narrow world. I’d like you all to inject a bit of chaos into that mix (good chaos; I think I’ve had plenty of bad chaos lately, what with sick animals, broken computers, and all manner of teaching problems filling up the gaps). Push me in new directions. Leave a comment!
Book Review Up: Last Days by Brian Evenson
This is a twisted one, but really entertaining. My review can be found here, as usual. If you like the twisted and macabre, then this is a book for you!
Talk Like a Pirate Day: Fast Ships, Black Sails!
Avast! Today be Talk Like a Pirate Day, a day o’ rejoicin’ an’ rum drinkin’ for all pirates everywhere. On such a day we be needin’ to set sail on the high seas to spread the word o’ somethin’ tha pulls us all together with it’s piratey goodness! Cap’in’s Ann and Jeff Vandermeer’s anthology Fast Ships, Black Sails, published by the fine sailors at Night Shade Books and smuggled to all th’ corners o’ the earth by Amazon. The tome, fer those wi’ the cunning t’read it, is packed like a barrel o’salt pork ready fer a month at sea wi’ tales o’ our fine people set in fantastical an’ science fictional places.Fast Ships, Black Sails is penned by a fine collection o’ landlubberly scribes like Kage Baker, an’ Elizabeth Bear. Fine tellers o’ tales they be, some o’ the best! Inside this tome ye can find:“Raising Anchor” – Ann & Jeff VanderMeer“Boojum” – Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette“Araminta, or, The Wreck of the Amphidrake” – Naomi Novik“Avast, Abaft!” – Howard Waldrop“I Begyn as I Mean to Go On” – Kage Baker“Castor on Troubled Waters” – Rhys Hughes“Elegy for Gabrielle, Patron Saint of Healers, Whores and Righteous Thieves” – Kelly Barnhill“Skillet and Saber” – Justin Howe“The Nymph’s Child” – Carrie Vaughn“68˚06’N, 31˚40’W” – Conrad Williams“Pirate Solutions” – Katherine Sparrow“We Sleep on a Thousand Waves” – Brendan Connell“Pirates of the Suara Sea” – David Freer & Eric Flint“Voyage of the Iguana” – Steve Aylett“Iron Face” – Michael Moorcock“A Cold Day in Hell” – Paul Batteiger“Captain Blackheart Wentworth” – Rachel Swirsky“The Whale Below” – Jayme Lynn Blaschke“Beyond the Sea Gate of the Scholar-Pirates of Sarskoe” – Garth Nix Fine tales, to be sure, from fine scribes, new an’ old. If yer in a piratey mood, pillage yeself some dubloons and buy it. Night Shade Books has some mighty fine tales fer sale, an’ they’re a small press, so buyin’ their tomes helps them keep their ship afloat! So, matey, find yeself a bookseller and hand over those dubloons, or ye might find yerself walkin’ the plank! Arr! (Thank to Capt’n Bourneville fer translatin’ me landlubber speak into th’ true tongue!)
Punking Everything in SF/F (Part Five): The (Closer) Past (Cyberpunk C)
Now we come to the crux of the cyberpunk movement: its death. Cyberpunk was, unfortunately, always a movement that was losing momentum as it gained it. Even Gibson saw the looming death of the subgenre. He said so during a book signing some years back that I attended; he remarked that he had always considered the label “cyberpunk” to be a death note for any author, because it would be hailed almost exclusively as a label one could never escape. He was, of course, mostly right. Most of the cyberpunk voices that took up the mantle of cyber and punk are largely silent today, with exception to the greats who were able to live outside the limited scope of cyberpunk itself. Gibson, now, is a contemporary novelist who uses the furniture of cyberpunk, but does not write cyberpunk novels (though not in the same sense as Harlan Ellison and science fiction). Why did cyberpunk die in the United States and other far west countries? To answer this we have to look at what is so terrifying about the prospect of the death of science fiction. The fear, it seems, is invoked in the terror of the encroaching future. Science fiction is presumed to be dying precisely because we are already in its propose initiating point (i.e. the originary point of all science fiction tales that forever complicates the notion that science fiction is about the future). Whatever notion of future (present and past) there may be in the science fiction landscape, proponents of its death assume that its originary point limits its relevance. As such, most science fiction would seem to have found its death in two ways: 1) where it has ceased to have relevance to the projections or speculations upon the future, effected here by the prospect of the future always moving faster towards us, exponentially with the complicating of the micro-processor and processing power (the death of near- and almost-near-future science fiction); 2) the loss of the “sensawunda” or the loss of the shock of the novum (as Darko Suvin applies it to SF). Both of these deaths, however flawed, are hailed by Deathers (to take clever liberty with the Birther movement President Obama is all too familiar with) as the definitive moments that have disrupted science fiction from the fabric of literature. However, unlike science fiction, cyberpunk was always already dying, because it came at the dawn of its futuristic imagination. That imagination, coupling the speculative future of science fiction with the present conditions of networks, could never leap beyond, in its purest form, its originary point. Whatever lay beyond could be nothing more than an amalgam, a bastardized version of the real thing clinging like a parasite to the master beast: science fiction. Cyberpunk died because it did not contain within its structure the ability to survive the future; once its future became true, at least insofar as its key elements were concerned (primarily the adoption of the Internet on a massive level and the introduction of the hacker or socially-inept figure who resists through difference the systemic structures of corporatism), then it had nowhere else to go, except to merge with other, more adaptable forms. Cyberpunk was, and always will be, an evolutionary dead end in the face of genre. That is not to say that cyberpunk is truly gone; no, as I have indicated here, cyberpunk was adopted, even absorbed into other forms, particularly the master narrative of science fiction and the various more prolific and profitable sub-entities (particularly military SF and space opera, two subgenres that have yet to reach their originary point). But, as a punk genre, as a genre with something to say, cyberpunk is dead, because as much as we might see its elements lingering in the bulbous mass of science fiction and even in the quasi-fictions of modern popular movies (the Bourne books, Mission Impossible, and even the new incarnations of James Bond, among other less “masculine” items), it is never a part of the critique of modern culture. Even when it is taken up again and presented in its “purest” form, it is saying nothing that has not already been uttered, and is relegated to the position of the clone with a neon sign suspended over its head saying, “Read me at your own risk. I am infected.” Cyberpunk is dead, but not buried. Whether it can ever been revitalized without being seen as the infected zombie of literature is yet to be seen. But now we get to the question of why cyberpunk has largely been overlooked. We could easily blame Hollywood for perpetuating the idealized image of the punk: a figure who is a reluctant hero, whose fingers are sewn to the keyboard or always ready to smash the face of the unsuspecting villain with brute fury. If The Matrix had only come when cyberpunk was at its peak; then, we might have seen something new, something dreamt in the void and resistant to even the hackneyed attempts by Hollywood to appropriate the punk in cyberpunk for its ironically (for the punk) capitalist purposes (again, no offense meant to capitalists or capitalism, but blunt language is necessary here). Instead, we had Hackers, an impressive film for being so absurdly absurd that it developed its own cult movement akin to a watered down version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the various other films that have long since been deleted from my memory. We could blame Hollywood, then, for making cyberpunk into what it never was, in bringing the public to the edge and then tossing them over, telling them that the bottom of the cliff is covered in pillows, when in actuality there are stones. Alternatively, we could blame academia for its long fight against all forms of science fiction and related genres, one it is thankfully losing piece-by-piece (hell, even Fredric Jameson has written a book on science fiction). The reality is that there is no right reason for the avoidance of cyberpunk
Writing Prompt #5: LGBTQ
In honor of the Outer Alliance, here is this month’s writing prompt: Write a story of any length that involves a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer character or theme, in a positive light. That means don’t write an anti-LGBT story, though you certainly could write a story dealing with the trails of LGBT life or the conflicts between anti-LGBT and pro-LGBT individuals. And there you have it. Straightforward and possibly a lot of fun to do. Have at it!